Today is Gay Pride Day in San Francisco. (Shouldn't it really be LGBTQQA Pride Day?). People sometimes ask about the pride thing. Why should you be proud of something you were just born with? Well, that's not really the point. Like "Black Pride" --the original contrarian pride, I think--, it is just a strong way of denying shame, of saying, Despite what I've been told, I am not ashamed of who I am.

Businessman: Nice catch! how long did it take to catch all this nice tuna?

Fisherman: Not very long.

Businessman: But then, why didn’t you stay out longer and catch more?

Fisherman: This catch is sufficient to meet my needs and those of my family.

Businessman: But what do you do with the rest of your time?

Fisherman: I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a nap with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs…I have a full life.”

Businessman: I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Los Angeles or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge enterprise.

Fisherman: How long would that take?

Businessman: Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years.

Fisherman: And after that?

Businessman: Afterwards? That’s when it gets really interesting. When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!

Fisherman: Millions? Really? And after that?

Businessman: After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a nap, and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends!

You may find the White Nationalism uncomfortable, but Greg Johnson has a lot of very sensible things to say about gay marriage and sex and marriage in general.

The Paul VI of the White Right :)

Happy Pride Day!

A good point along the way:

for if integrity to one’s values is the highest value, in the end, it will be one’s only value. For the easiest way to insure perfect integrity and to make hypocrisy impossible is to value nothing but being oneself at the present moment, i.e., to collapse any difference between the real and the ideal, to affirm that whatever happens to be real at any given moment is the ideal. In short, the only way to always practice what one preaches is to preach nothing but one practices. And that boils down to doing whatever one feels like from moment to moment, a kind of groundless self-affirmation which is pretty much the moral and cultural dead end toward which liberalism is leading.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

My hard drive is being de-fragged and optimized. Wish there were an app to do that for the rest of my life.

Nothing I have read in the news this morning indicates that I am wrong about the de facto civil war between the Two Americas.

The White House is making nice with the Muslim Brotherhood and gangs of feral Black youfs continue their intifada while a (White) Texas teenager is in jail and is facing serious prison time for "making terroristic threats" during an on-line video game.

The real GOP: The Elephant in the Room

is a White Elephant

If the ideological and racial differences were geographically concentrated, we'd have a full-swing secession movement going on. As it is, with few exceptions, we are grossly enmeshed with one another. Even VDH now sees us as Rome in AD 200. I think he's being optimistic. Odoacer is already on the throne.

With all due humility, I still find my thought experiment about A Day Without A Caucasian the most enlightening perspective on our current mess. It's not the whole story, --it does not cover the awful damage done by feminism--but it's the basic story.

Even ethnically homogeneous societies develop internal fissures; that's the way of things and unavoidable. But the ghastly "multicultural" model now dissolving the West is a setup for failure and disaster, especially when it is ruled by the delusions of egalitarianism and endless whining about "racism." Both common sense and history tell you that forcing people to live together whose ways of being and thinking and doing are so alien to one another is a crime. Why the hell do you have separate countries in the first place?

When in Rome, do as the Romans do used to be common policy. Now it's When In Rome, Turn It Into Mexico. (The very place, btw, that was so effed up that you had to leave it.)

Listening to Antonin Scalia the other day, he offered a background to the Bill of Rights amended to the original constitution. Because I am so used to them, I did not see that they do in fact seem to be a hodgepodge of items without any internal coherence. His point: they list the issues that a tyrant was likely to press and they set up protections against his tyranny. But, as the Gnostic scriptures say, Against human folly Heaven itself has no defense.

There is a quote that liberals like, from Sinclair Lewis, that "when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." He was utterly wrong.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

The Section 13 "Human Rights" Tribunals are abolished. No more extra-judicial bureaucrat commissars with a 100% conviction rate, harassing and fining deviants from the canons of PC. A small step against a loathsome but perfectly logical and natural outcome of the liberal regime. Were it not for the First Amendment of those evil Old White Slaveholding Males, we'd have these things sprouting like mushrooms here, too.

Plus, Canada Pensions has tracked me down --I don't know how-- to let me know what my old age pension will be. Not much, but it will pay for my US Medicare premiums. Which is nice.

Like the President's middle name, this murderer's middle name conveniently dropped out of sight shortly after the crime happened. More gruesome info, within a standard We Failed Him narrative, about Moses Alfredo Kamin, who slaughtered the adoptive parents who, in hindsight, foolishly thought they could overcome his structural defects.

Still no photo of him, even though he's convicted and in for 25 years to life.

Were it not for the worse consequences of such a law and practice, the female who birthed him should have been sterilized.

And of course no mention is made at all of the racial difference between the boy and the two people who adopted him. It is amazing to me how race is simultaneously the most obsessively important and taboo-laden issue in our culture and yet can, indeed must, be blithely denied and ignored when the good intentions of the high-minded are involved or the PR for the Sacred Victim Minority might not match the required standards.

opined recently that the passage of the immigration bill --an Obamacare-like document too large to read-- would unleash a further flood of Hispanic (Mexican) immigration and eventually turn the United States into two countries.

Teddy Roosevelt wrote: "...then the end of the Roman republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing."

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Although my disdain for the liberal trance is undimmed, it's not only ideology and human folly that make things fall apart. It is also conditions. I have suspected that the US is simply too big to function as a single country. Add to that all the Balkanizing and it seems less likely that this once great Republic will continue in its present form. Just too big.

As Ex Cathedra becomes more racially reactionary, --more reactiony in general--I continue to note that People of Color in drama must be played "authentically" by actors who match the race or ethnicity of the role. No more Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan. That is considered a grave offence indeed.

Likewise, though, White culture's figures in drama are not only no longer restricted to Whites, but their replacement --and that is the technically correct word for the process-- is considered both an achievement and some kind of payment on a long-standing debt. So a new Hercules movie will star Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who is Black and Samoan.

Notice the rule here: Non-White roles are restricted to the appropriate ethnic actors, by sacred right*. Whites have no right to White roles: that, btw, is what "color-blind casting" really means. (Nor do males have a right to male roles. In Warehouse 13, HG Wells is revealed to have been a woman.)

Indeed, Whites and males have no rights whatsoever in face of the demands of racial Others or women. Non-White self-assertion is morally unimpeachable, a truth of nature and history. White self-assertion --unthinkable to most brainwashed Whites-- is rank racism. To use my image of late, we are the Dying Rich Uncle: our ownership of anything is a merely contingent fact of history, soon to be remedied when the unloving, resentful and greedy heirs get their hands on our stuff.

Hell, there was even a time when Americans would have rejected the idea of Superman being played by a Brit.

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*Johnny Depp will play Tonto in the upcoming Lone Ranger film. That's an interesting move. My suspicion is that Tonto is considered a subserviant figure to a White, so Indians were not so interested in the part. And I bet that there will be rivers of PC angst and revenge from Depp's Tonto.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

When I was with my ex T, a man of very literal imagination about some things, I often had to remind him that the irrational or unpleasant things in a movie were there to drive the story. If everyone were nice and did the rational thing, the story would be A) boring and B) over in two minutes.

My love (and kinda hate, I realize) affair with Brit mysteries continues with Inspector Lynley. Without the homely, angry, cold, bitter, narcissistic, resentful, empty, joyless, paranoid bitch who is his partner, (not to put too fine a point on it) a lot of the energy of the story would be lost. I am no fan of inferior people with a chronic chip of their shoulders.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Another beautiful cool sunny morning. God, that blue in the sky is so...blue.

Got a date with Mr B this afternoon, now that he's back from his annual Get The Hell Outta Dodge vacation. That, as always, will be a pleasure.

He's an Enneagram Seven, dedicated to enjoying life. Which he does very well. My weekly dinner last night is with a Two and a One. Someone dedicated to Caretaking and someone dedicated to Righteousness. Last night they both added their personal chemistry to make for a tiring evening. I'm looking forward to the chemistry of enjoyment today.

Friday, June 21, 2013

If you want to know the real status of the races in America, here is another example.

People of Color...when does any one of them ever apologize to Whites for anything offensive they say about us?

And here it is even clearer. She has to grovel for using a word that they use all the time in speech and song. It is an exercise of dominance and privilege, to say the word in front of us that any of us will lose our jobs for using.

Every time a White does this routine, she or he tightens up the moral order in which we are eternally guilty.

We are the old and dying rich uncle Sam, unloved and resented by the greedy offspring, just waiting for us to pass on.

It's Summer now. But I managed to get my sorta annual kitchen floor refinishing done under the wire on Tuesday. It only looks terrific when compared to the sad state it was in before I re-did it. That I will not put up on the net.

Watching show about daily life in Elizabethan England, there's an incredible gap between this very modest old kitchen and what even royal kitchens were capable of then: running water at hand and on demand, both cold and hot. Refrigeration and freezing. Canned food. Spices only the aristocracy could afford, in plastic jars. An oven and stove with cheap, clean, always-available and easily adjustable (and predictable) heat. A microwave and a toaster. Bright light through clear glass windows with adjustable blinds. Electric lighting when needed. And a (portable) electric dishwasher.

To an Elizabethan farmer or even townsman, all this would be as amazing as the Replicator on board the USS Enterprise. We take so much for granted.

(There's blue tape over the back door because a gay carpenter and his assistant are making extensive repairs to the highly rotted wood of the two story back deck stairs.)

Thursday, June 20, 2013

After the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, Oliver Cromwell's remains were dug up and hung in chains at Tyburn, while the living commissioners involved in the death of King Charles I were hung, drawn and quartered.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

During a very mediocre scifi movie from 2001, Adrian Paul --one of God's finer creations-- is bantering with girlfriend/scientist Amanda Topping about how the artificial black hole will destroy the earth. When she points out that it would surface in Texas and swallow it up, Paul responds, "Texas? Bush country. No great loss."

Out of nowhere. Droll, no?

Imagine a similar scene with the black hole aimed at Chicago, and Paul says, "Chicago? Obama country. No great loss."

Well, the scandal...the gross racism, the privileged insensitivity, the rank disrespect for the high office of President, --after all, you didn't produce that movie by yourself!--the insult to the people of the great city of Chicago...

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

For a long time, the fourplex where I live had four male tenants. The most, dramatic, shall we say, of us departed several years ago and since then there have been a succession of White Male/Asian Female couples living there in that unit. Two sets have been actual tenants, one after the other,and in the last year, while one of them has been away on a long global trip, two more have been house sitting.

I just met the latest couple. They knocked on my door, introduced themselves and gave me freshly baked scones.

But then, all Minorities are Deserving, aren't they? After all, they're not us. And if it weren't for us and our evil ways, they, too would have created great civilizations, with prosperous and functioning democracies.

After all, since everyone on earth is equal, the fact that they haven't must be our fault. Right?

Sunday, June 16, 2013

The TV pre-quel series Hannibal is over for the season. In a word: nice try.

The detective character, Will Graham, is too pitiable. Hannibal --whose suit and tie distract me all the time-- is too flat. He lacks the satanic joy that Antony Hopkins brought to the character. None of the women have the spunk of a Starling. Focusing so much energy on this teenager drains the life out of the two men. And really, unless we are playing the tired-out multiculti game of the The Black Police Superior, why is Laurence Fishburne there. Or anywhere?

Thursday, June 13, 2013

We all know about the contested lands of the Middle East, Israel and the Palestinians.

I decided to see how good my geographical memory is and tried to fill in the names of all the countries of Asia on a blank map. I did well. I only missed three of the Stans: Kyrgyz, Turkmeni and Tashiki.

I kept looking for Tibet.

When I opened up the search for political maps which show country names, after several passes, I realize that Tibet is gone.

Not on the map anymore.

You have to admire the Chinese. And I do. I wish we were a lot more like them, we pussified Westerners with our human rights and blah blah blah. Their single-mindedness and utter unwillingness to apologize or take criticism is evident to everyone.

They took Tibet and now every just accepts it.

But the Israeli-Arab thing. Because it's the noble West which is the enemy, that will go on til the Messiah comes.

As background while I am plowing through some financials, I had on a semi-documentary about the prelude to the 1066 Norman conquest of Britain. Fascinating stories of Viking raids in the north that same year, which exhausted the English forces, even though they dealt the Northmen a surprising and decisive blow from which they never recovered. Three hundred dragon ships arrived to pillage the island and only twenty-two returned to the fjords.

But then William came across the channel, contesting Harold's claim to Edward the Confessor's throne, and altered England forever.

Later, still plowing through paperwork, I watched one of those English mystery series, with a detective seeking evildoers among the aristocracy, post-war. (You can tell how old I am because post-war immediately means post-WWII to me still.) Anyway, they had one of the staple characters of these stories: the coldhearted, angry and bitter --at a man or men in general--, heavily-made-up upper class English female murder.

I've noticed this before, but even adjusting for the genre, the Brits do come across as extraordinarily angry people, ready to explode under those tightly controlled exteriors.

This is the southern view I wake up to each morning. Not a great shot. The blue of the sky against the evergreens is much clearer and deeper, the details of the trees and plants are very visible, and the sunlight bouncing off the wall (my kitchen) is not so glaring.

Unless I know someone well, I keep my political opinions to myself. Diversity of thought is not wanted in Gayland. When it has sometimes become obvious that I am not part of the Borg, my interlocutor will usually ask --half aghast, half fascinated, as if encountering an exotic visitor from a foreign land for the first time-- "So you're a Republican?"

I have found that the conversation comes to a satisfying end when I say, No. The Republicans are pussies. I'm much more to the Right than that. Slighty left of Ghengis Khan."

After that, changing the subject is what always happens. Suits me fine.

On an opposite and, to me, charming note, my Republican sister* discovered, during dinner at her house last January, that I have not always been a conservative, but only switched sides in 2000. She was horrified. But all this time, she said, I though you were so smart. Only in 2000? Oh, my God.

*I have two left. She's married to a Jewish multimillionaire, a world-class mensch who has made her very happy and has been the best of sons to my parents. And another Republican. My other sister is married to a successful --but nowhere near multimillionaire-- Jewish producer/director, who is likewise a sweetheart and another son. Despite their personal virtues, he and she are both hopeless Obamacrats.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

A sorta shocking aspect of The Thing From Another World (1951), a scifi classic, is the sexual game going on between the male lead and the lead scientist's female assistant. She has the very masculine and mouthy style that was so popular in WWII and post-war films, a dame, a broad. She clearly has the upper hand to start out with and their relation style, while clearly erotic, is very masculine. Proto-feminism?

And at one point, on his suggestion, she has him tied up in a chair, teasing him. For 1951, seems pretty advanced.

A note. The two camps are the soldiers (and the ex-military reporter) vs the scientists. The soldiers are all American White regular guys, full of banter but task focused. The scientists come off as urban, upperclass WASPy, kinda gay and immigrant/Jewish.

I'm sure there have been a raft of PoMo culture studies PhD's done on this flick and others like it.

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PS. If you want a clear example of how a director shapes a film, watch this one for speed patterns in dialogue. People in groups speak fast and in squalls, in staccato, leaving no space or quiet between sentences from one another.

I get regular photos from B of his trip through northern Spain. This is at A Coruña, in the northwest Galician region of the Iberian peninsula.

This lighthouse, locally called the Tower of Hercules, was built by the Romans in the 100's AD and has been in continuous use since then. It was refurbished in the 18th century, but there it is, almost 2000 years old.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Re-watching a 1988 film, The Presidio, with Mark Harmon and Sean Connery and Meg Ryan. A good flick.

But Ms Ryan's character pulls one of the classic female dishonesty moves. She decided to compensate for her childish, cowardly and manipulative behavior by verbally attacking her father, pouring out a barrage of resentments, disappointments, accusations, insults, all the while following him at close quarters through their house, from room to room, pressing him as he attempts to move away from her, asking her to stop talking. When she finally makes the intolerable remark, the one that she knows will cut to his heart, he swivels around and raises his hand as if to hit her.

He holds back, but then her face caves, as if betrayed, with shock and accusation in her eyes. As if he has done something unspeakable. Suddenly he is the criminal.

She provoked and provoked and provoked him. When he reacted, not striking her, but showing the desire to, she blamed him, as if he had smacked a child all unprovoked.

And he, stupid fool, accepted the unspoken accusation and crumpled, horrified at what he wanted to do.

(When she clearly deserved a good smack across the mouth.)

I suspect more than one man who has been hauled off to jail as a "domestic abuser" was driven to it by this kind of female behavior. Women like to think that as long as they don't strike a man...and hell, even if they do...then they are blameless for any violent pushback they receive, the innocent victims of male abuse.

People don't want to know that Islam is spatio-temporally aggressive, an expansionist and extravert theocracy convinced of its uniqueness and superiority. Plus, Muslims are uninfected by White Western liberal guilt and play the race card shamelessly. Note that this move was spearheaded by a Pakistani immigrant.

In Ex Cathedra's post-American republic, there will be freedom of religion, except for one.

*And speaking of Indians, a sweet gay love story with only 1.5 stereotypes and more than 2 likeable men in leading roles. A bit didactic, not a great work of literature, and one or two PC moments, but, hey, beggars can't be choosers.

Wandering through the internet Hindustan, I am reminded of the complexities of Vedic religion and its many manifestations. On the surface, of course, Hinduism is polytheistic. But underneath it is a belief that all these concrete and particular deities are manifestations of something Single. Or, as they like to say, Absolute.

With my rather Catholic mind, I find the borderlands between monotheism and polytheism not uncomfortable. We have the Trinity, but then also all the Virgin Mother and the Saints, who often play the role that the local gods played before evangelization. In only thinly Catholic places like South America, you can find the saints actually just fronting for the gods.

BTW, The surface likeness between the Father/Word/Spirit Trinity and the Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva triad and between Christ as the Incarnate God and Krishna as the Avatar of God are only surface likenesses. (Like the orthodox Trinity and the Mormon "trinity.")

In my little piece on Trinity Sunday, I opined that even though the doctrine is written in Greek philosophical language, it asserts ideas that the Greeks would find bizarre. What would have been much more Greek would be the kind of mono and poly theistic style of India, where a primordial unity reveals itself in time in multiple aspects. The old image of the ray of white light refracting through a prism into many colors. Modalism is the Christian variety and was rejected by orthodoxy long ago.

But like a lot of heresies, it has its appeal. Back in my more focussedly Gnostic days, my own theogony was based on a kind of Hegelian devolvement and reintegration of divine Aeons, Gnosticism's language for its very Greek modal mono/poly theism: the Primal One becoming Two, then producing their Fourfold, these Six in One then splitting into two antagonistic Triads which eventually re-integrate into a differentiated Unity. Ah, the religion of a Five!

In these days of the decline of the West, the dissipation of men, part of the blame can be laid at the door of Christianity. Now for a thousand years +, Christian Europe produced plenty of real men in abundance. As it played out, however, it gave birth to what we now call liberal democracy. Not a success in the long run. Shoots itself in the foot. But, to be fair, as my old Brooklyn Irish grandma used to say, "All human things, given time, go badly." You can see where I inherited my optimism.

So, inspired both by the Indians' god-for-every-occasion, my memory of the GrecoRoman and Nordic mythologies --both of which I absorbed like a sponge in my middle school years-- and even the nifty Seven Gods of Game of Thrones, I am finding it kinda amusing to recreate a male pantheon of Twelve Gods corresponding to the twelve masculine archetypes I keep finding, the combinings, permutations and cyclings of which pretty well account for men as we know them: Father, Warrior, Hunter, Judge, Joker, Laborer, Technician, Artisan, Poet, Shaman, Trader and...not so sure about whether Mentor, or Healer, should be one. Or a Friend.

Greece, Rome and Germania pretty well already provide gods, demigods and heroes for these archetypal modes already, and with the vividness of natural life. Christianity once was hospitable to these, both unconsciously in popular piety of the saints and more consciously in the Renaissance. Archetypal psychology was onto that, but got swallowed up in the Boomerism of its creators. Maybe someday another happy miscegenation will help us transcend our present morass.
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A History Channel piece on the Mughals, "The Warrior Empire", is all breathless about their weaponry and military prowess and architecture, etc. Not a word, a breath, a tiny hint of moral disapproval of invading another land. Perhaps that would be judgmental?

Now imagine a History Channel piece on the British in India. You can hear the preachers and schoolmarms of the new "post-colonial" enlightenment sigh and point fingers and regret.

Saturday, June 08, 2013

The first thing that the armies of the Religion of Peace (c) did after the death of Mohammad in 632 AD, was to expand his conquest of Arabia with a huge century-long war of subjugation, colonialism and imperialism. The Muslim world of North Africa, the Middle East, as far as Afghanistan and India...all became such by the sword.

Included in that first wave of expansion was Southwestern Europe. The French under Charles Martel managed to drive them back across the Pyrenees at Poitiers in 732. With the exception of a thin strip of land along the Iberian peninsula's north, the Roman Christian and then Visigothic Christian lands of Hispania were turned into Al-Andalus, part of the Caliphate of Cordoba.

Over the next 700 years, the Native Peoples pushed back in their Reconquista until finally, in 1492, the last Moorish stronghold in the south was re-taken and Islam was driven out of Spain. During that long war, one of the patrons of the Christians was the Apostle St James, whose reputed tomb at Compostela is a place of pilgrimage. One of his aspects was Santiago Matamoros, St James the Moor-Slayer, advocate for the Spanish in battling against Islam. Here is his statue in his cathedral, slaying Muslims.

Now, in the New Spain, the part of the enlightened and liberal New Europe, where secular highmindedness has replaced primitive Christianity, we have --courtesy of B, who sent this pic-- Santiago Cortaflores, Saint James the Florist, with the reality of both Spanish history and human life covered over in a spray of pastel denial. Lest, of course, any Muslims be offended. Inside a Catholic cathedral.

There are now 1 million Mohammedans in the land that many generations of Spaniards died to expel.

Friday, June 07, 2013

The big difference between The West and Islam, even according to this "Right Wing Granny's" review of Steyn is that women and men are equal, we don't hang homos and your religion is nobody's business.

Who fights and dies for things like these?

Nobody.

Even the LGBT crowd hate George Bush far more than they dislike Islam.

Islam is strong very largely because it is a "we" vs a "you", and the "we" --although it certainly has its internal strife-- is self-confident, unapologetic and ethnically based. It is a religion of angry and self-righteous ThirdWorld People.

The West has no "we" anymore, least of all, an identity based on anything so craven and primitive and Nazi-like as blood or race or common history thereof.

In the following war, Libertarians and Unitarians United For Niceness vs The Chinese Communist Party, who would you place your bets on?

If all "The West" is about is feminism, gay rights and irreligion, it's toast.

On my continuing India kick, an extraordinary three-part series on YouTube, Welcome To India 2012, about poor Indians who are trying to make more money. And I mean really, really poor. (Cellphones, however, abound.) What is so amazing about it is the relentlessly upbeat and wholly un-condescending attitude toward these people, as well as their own completely un-self-pitying attitude. And a lot of the work they do is, by Western standards, filthy and dangerous and degrading. But no transcending the world of illusion here; these folks are hustling. And they smile and laugh. A lot.

You could easily take the same stories and, with a different musical background and a different voiceover narrative, make them out to be hapless victims of some horrible something or other, capitalism, global inequality, whatever. Pope Francis would take you on a looooong guilt trip.

But nope, the approach is completely un-sentimental and chock full of Indian boosterism: Look how tough and inventive we are as we go after money, money, money. Even more amazingly, the BBC --the drearily leftist PC voice of dying Britain-- is involved. And not a hint of negative judgment in sight. Amazing.

You get to see a wholly different set of cultures and you get to see India completely absent the gooey spiritualizing haze that some Westerners like to lay over it. Family is hugely important. These people are tough, competitive, not at all above doing whatever it takes to make a buck.

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

My fascination continues with British India and its aftermath in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh. After passing over two films that started out blaming the Brits for all of India/Pakistan's troubles (Post-Colonial Adolescent Blaming Syndrome), I found one about Jinnah, who founded Pakistan.

Jinnah, a highly Anglicized lawyer who only spoke English well, and a Muslim with little interest in the Muslim religion, moved from a united India position to making an independent Islamic state his life's goal. He sold the idea --which was originally pressed on him by others and only after much resistance on his part-- based on the fear that Muslims would be less than 2nd class citizens in an India dominated by Hindus.

Whether by discrimination (the simplest explanation) or built-in limitations, it turns out he was right. The condition of the 150 million + Muslims among India's over 1.2 billion people, 4 out of 5 of whom are Hindu, is poor. The only sector where they outperform the Hindus is in numbers in prison.

They have achieved a similar distinction in all the countries of Europe where they have invaded migrated.

The reason that India came to think of itself as a single country at all was the Brits. The reason India is not a single country was not the Brits, it was the Muslims. Seems they create happiness and peace wherever they go...

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PS. The details of the violence and death around Partition are truly horrifying. All the worst kinds of human behavior acted out again and again. No wonder the Indians and the Pakis hate each other. Of course, the hatred was already there, beneath the surface, before Partition. The Brits kept it contained.

One. I gave August a shot. Another gay movie. Old Boy Friend moves back to LA after years away and contacts Past Lover, who's now living with New Boy Friend. OBF makes moves on Past Lover, who still carries a bit of a torch for him. They wind up in bed, threatening the new relationship. When Past Lover asks why Old Boy Friend is suddenly interested after all this time, Old Boy Friend says, "I don't know."

Click.

Two. I have an inexplicable affection for actor/director Charlie David.

I keep wanting him to succeed. (Like Kevin Costner.) Don't ask me why. He's too close to the pretty end of the spectrum, but there's something kinda likeable about him. In Judas Kiss*, even though he is disheveled and nervous, it's still obvious that he is a quite handsome fella. He approaches this young thing

and is rebuffed by "the beautiful young Nate" (????), whereupon he chastises himself for punching above his weight and out of his league. After all, how could he, a 7 at most, approach a 9 like Nate?

When you wake up in the morning from a vivid dream and it gives you a knot in your stomach, do the previous day's anxieties create the dream or did the dream actually make the knot appear in your stomach?

This one was both kinda abstract --a good part of it consisted of text on a screen-- and very vivid at the same time, with the repetitive and cramped OCD quality that my less pleasant dreams tend to have. It had to do with the unexplained disappearance of a group of people, the Cambrians, who lived in northern Spain, whose absence had been preceded a few days ago by a similar disappearance of another group of 500, whose name began with B. In the dream I realized that this first group was a figment of my imagination, not real. I wound up wondering, in the dream, if I had lost my grip on reality. Or if the Buddhists were right and all the things we consider real and hold on to are just a cosmic junkpile of wishes and illusions. It left me a bitshaken. And my stomach is still not calmed down, hours later.

It's likely that part of this is just separation anxiety. B is in northern Spain at the moment. But it was my discovery of the unreality of something which felt quite real that disturbed me.

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

How many people leave items for sale on Craigslist after it's* they've already been sold and taken away.

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*Sometimes my passions get the better of my grammar. I had the honor of having my incorrect pronoun structure corrected by a professional teacher of English to foreigners, who is now in a foreign land. And he belongs to a union, too.

Speaking of the Pope, an English priest of very authority-reverent an traditional cast has noticed Francis' "understanding of his Papacy, where everything seems to depend on his personal charm and charisma." Bingo. Welcome to the world of the extravert feeling type.

Don't know how I missed this, but in The Next Generation, we are told that earthlings "no longer enslave animals to use them as food". So all the apparent meat they eat comes from their magical replicator technology, the same machine that produces Earl Gray Tea, Hot out of thin air.

I love ethical highmindedness, especially when it's based on the impossible.

The Indiana Jones flix (numbers one through three, not four) are terrific. Amazing that they were written by the same George Lucas who has inflicted Star Wars on us. Temple of Doom is a happy festival of unabashed Orientalism. Oh, and sexism, too. Ex Cathedra enjoyed it very much.

Had a conversation the other day which confirmed what a moderate I am. My ex T is currently of the opinion that when the mother ship from his homeworld comes to rescue him, he will arrange for the human species to be cleansed from the planet, except for about 20 of us.

Now, soft-hearted Ex Cathedra's fantasy of a forest of gallows only requires the deaths of a few thousand people. An old softy, that's me.

PS. There'd be a lot of expulsion and exile, to be sure, but only a few thousand deaths.

I noticed that the three male faces of the Godhead in Game of Thrones nearly match the three primary roles of men, according to Ex Cathedra. The bedrock of the archetypal male is fathering, fighting and feeding. The Father and the Warrior are two of the Seven's faces. The third male face, the Smith, while not a hunter, does resonate with the requirement that males have mastery of certain skills needed to maintain life. In a post-hunter/gatherer society, the artisan who makes tools (and weapons) is in that ballpark. In Western pagan terms, we have here Zeus/Odin, Mars and Vulcan.

I just watched part of a horrible video depicting Black South Africans stoning and kicking a naked Black Somali to death in the street. Apparently he was a small shopkeeper who resisted looting by the local Bantus. I have a strong stomach but I had to turn it off before it finished. Part of the awfulness was the off-camera sound of women shouting encouragement, laughing and clapping. It was not bloody, but it was grotesque.

But the more important question --as I learned from General Casey-- is: is this racist? I mean, when Black South Africans slaughter a Black Somali in the street, since there are not Whites involved, can that be racist?

I supposed, though, that whatever drove these poor people to kill like that must be the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.

To think otherwise, well, that would be raciss.

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PS, if you look at the comments following the video in its original YouTube setting, you can see that Somalis and other Africans have their own inter-group issues. Lots of angry name calling. Which is common on YouTube comments, which have been called the mosh-pit of the planet.

Sunday, June 02, 2013

I have watched Game of Thrones on Sunday nights, largely because there's not much else. The Borgias is a train wreck.

I have found Mr Martin's medieval world fairly tough going, with few characters strong enough to like. The Lannister Dwarf is the most interesting by far.

But I will say this for the author: This evening's bloodbath shows that he has a rare dishibition about killing off major characters long before the story ends. I'll give him that. If you thought that offing Ned Stark in season one was bad, consider the viewers' reaction to this memorable wedding.

And if you think that Mr Filch, the ill-tempered squib caretaker at Hogwarts, was unlikeable, wait till you see him as Lord Walder Frey...

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One of Martin's religions, that of the Seven, is a nicely Modalist mix of the One and the Many: God's male faces --Father, Warrior and Smith-- and female faces --Mother, Maiden and Crone-- with the seventh face that of The Stranger, the face of Death.

It strikes me how far gone I am when I can watch, and much enjoy, both the Harry Potter films and The Jewel in the Crown, and see through the foreground moralism to take away a message pretty well opposite from what the author's conscious intention seems to be. To the extent that a story has archetypal power, it must also lie beyond the control of an individual ego. As with any work of art, it does take on a life of its own.

One of things I learned in my years of hermeneutics, philosophical and theological, is that an author, known or unknown, cannot wholly control the meaning of his text, or in Rowling's case, hers. For both Brits, JKR and Scott, their gift as storytellers eventually outruns the constricted bounds of their moral egos. As with constitutional or Biblical interpretation, you can investigate the stated or learned intentions of the author, but in the end it's the text itself. Not only its content, but its literary form, which shapes the content. Not original intention of the authors but original meaning of the text. And the capacities of the readers, of course. Interpretation is always dialogical.

With Rowling, any cheap racial roman a clef that could be drawn from the purebloods vs mixed bloods theme is overwritten massively by the very structures of the world required to hold it. With Scott, if you combine an archetypal eye with a larger knowledge of history, the character one reviewer has described as "the most finely drawn villain in English literature" is revealed as a complex and even ambiguous villain. And subsidiary to the Eve/Pandora characters whose combination of self-righteous curiosity and boundary-breaking set the whole tragedy in motion.

In Ex Cathedra's dialogue with these stories, which fascinate him so much that he has viewed them many times, his allergy to moralism --especially certain kinds of Foolish Leukophore moralism-- reveals, IHHO, a back story at least in tension with, if not wholly at odds with, the high-mindednesss of the authors. Who, in the end, thank God, are far better storytellers than preachers.

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo

In A Nutshell

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's onlyjob is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.

Demography as Destiny

"...then the end of the Roman republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing." Theodore Roosevelt, 1911

Multiculti Suicide

"Modern liberal societies in Europe and North America* celebrate their own pluralism and multiculturalism, arguing in effect that their identity is to have no identity."

Francis Fukuyama

Identity & Migration (2007)

*(White societies, that is.)

Equality's Dark Side (Oops, is that raciss?)

"“The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835